Outback Heroines

by Sue Williams

  There were also plenty of stints as a guest speaker and MC at functions, talking about how to deal with stress and change. ‘I’d learnt a lot from my life!’ Belinda laughs. ‘I always say it’s important to turn the negative things we experience in life into positive experiences by reflecting on them and learning from them, and by using them as your markers in life. For me, even that time the boyfriend said I’d never make it in life without him became a source of strength. It became my inspiration to succeed.’

  One more dark experience in Belinda’s life lay in wait, however. In 1993, she married plastics entrepreneur Neville Browne and, after the marriage breakdown three years later, the couple fought through the courts for the next seven years. ‘After one month of marriage, I realised I’d made a huge error of judgement,’ she says. ‘That marriage was the single regret of my life. I felt I’d been in a black hole a few times before, but nothing like that.’

  As a break from the battles, she decided she needed to touch the earth again, to go bush, to get into the Outback. Years before, when she’d been with John, she’d taken part in businessman Dick Smith’s first-ever annual Bourke to Burketown Bash, where a bunch of people drove in old cars from Sydney to far-west New South Wales and then on to Far North Queensland to raise money for the children’s charity Variety. The pair had broken down even before they reached the start, on the way to Bourke. But one of the organisers had been Sydney car dealer Steve Mason, who’d been travelling with the President of the Variety Club in a Holden FJ. Belinda and he became good friends.

  Over the years, they stayed in touch on and off and, in the year 2000, she even went on one of a series of Outback car rallies he started himself, the Desert Duel, to help raise money for the Sydney Paralympics athletes. Now, in the fallout over her second marriage, she called him again, and asked if she could go on his upcoming rally to the Outback. ‘I just felt I needed to be in the Outback,’ she says. ‘I wanted to see the big skies again and the sharp colours, all the stuff I love about the Outback. It’s a real raw beauty that helps put your life into perspective; it can heal you, it has enormous power. It reminds you of the big picture.

  ‘Steve and I were just acquaintances, but then one night we sat by a campfire talking about life: where we were in life and what stage we were at. He’d had some unhappiness in his life too. I just liked the gentleness in him.’

  He was equally drawn to her. ‘She was a very popular winner of Miss World and she’d always attend any charity function she could,’ says Steve. ‘I remember we had a Variety Club raffle and people asked her to sit on their knee for a photo for a $100 donation, and she wouldn’t hesitate if it was for a good cause.’

  When the rally finished and everyone returned home, Steve rang Belinda to see if she wanted to have a game of tennis and some lunch. They took things slowly. ‘I was still going through all the court stuff,’ says Belinda. ‘But Steve said, “You have to stop it!” I said I didn’t know how. So he said he would . . .’

  From that moment on, life took a much happier turn for Belinda. Her time in the Outback had ended up giving her so much: space for reflection, the chance to get back in touch with nature, and eventually a new man. Steve, who’d quit being a car dealer after 30 years in the family business, was a softly spoken, kind man who was eager to get to know her for who she really was – not for the title she’d won years before, for her looks or for her fame. In response, she blossomed.

  Belinda had still always longed to return to the country and keep lots of animals, and when she and Steve took a long drive in 2004 through rural New South Wales on the way to Cowra in the state’s central west, where she was due to present some sports awards, the pair spotted their perfect property for sale: a beautiful old house, built in 1896 of bricks made from the clay in the dam, on a hill, on 50 hectares of land west of Cowra. They both fell in love with it immediately, bought it and moved in as soon as they could.

  ‘I can’t imagine myself back in the city now,’ says Belinda, who, among the sheep the pair farm for their wool, keeps a veritable menagerie of animals at the property, including Gary the goat, a couple of horses, a veritable mob of young kangaroos, what’s possibly the world’s largest pet sheep, plus other pet sheep that were hand-reared but are now beginning to die of old age. ‘Whenever I go to the city, I’m amazed at how people put up with all the traffic; I can never even find a parking space. In the city, you can’t look at the big skies and the beautiful sunsets and smell the moisture up your nostrils from the rain, and, of course, you just can’t have all these animals . . .’

  For now, Belinda has her hands completely full, giving back to the Outback. She does a huge amount of work as a volunteer with WIRES, the NSW Wildlife Information Rescue and Education Service, which is the largest wildlife rescue organisation in Australia. She’s the local care coordinator for macropods – namely kangaroos and wallabies – and as well as giving talks to schoolkids about the value of Australia’s wildlife, using puppets to illustrate what she says and even sometimes wearing a kangaroo suit, she also educates everyone about how to care for them, encouraging drivers or passers-by to check the pouches of any kangaroos killed in road accidents for surviving joeys. She nurses the injured ones herself, too, and coordinates their care, keeping them at the property until they’re well enough to be set free.

  ‘She’s an amazing asset to WIRES,’ says the co-founder of the organisation, Mikla Lewis. ‘She threw herself into the work and is so involved in everything. She’s been a great fundraiser for our work, and she has such commitment and energy and compassion and warmth.’

  Belinda’s first task for WIRES was looking after a baby wallaroo, a distinct species that’s a cross in size between a kangaroo and a wallaby, whose mother had been shot. She named him Wally, and he became completely domesticated until he vanished through the open front gate three years later – about the time he was ready to breed, she would go on to discover. She was heartbroken and put ads in the local newspaper, asking: ‘Where’s Wally?’ ‘I’d drive all around, freezing cold on the quad bike, through all the paddocks, through all the neighbours’ places; I looked for months,’ she says. ‘Then someone rang WIRES saying there was a wallaroo that kept hanging around their backyard and, sure enough, it was Wally. But he kicked up such a fight when they were trying to relocate him that they had to let him go. So I know he’s out there somewhere! But that made me realise that I needed to be educated. So I did some courses with WIRES, including the snake-handling one, and I’ve been helping ever since.’

  Her favourite animal is the eastern grey kangaroo. ‘It’s been an amazing love affair with them,’ she says, smiling fondly at two joeys now asleep in her lap. ‘They’re the most fragile because they stress very easily and they die from stress or myopathy – a muscular disease – and they have to stay in a family or a mob, whereas something like a swamp wallaby or a red-necked wallaby or a wallaroo is more solo, so they tend to go off on their own. The greys are intelligent and so affectionate. But it’s appalling how we treat our kangaroos, our national icon. We’re shooting them, turning them into dog meat and big companies are using their skins for running shoes. Since 2001, our total kangaroo population has declined by an incredible 55 per cent. I think there are better ways for us to live in harmony with our precious wildlife and, as human beings, we have to find those ways.’

  Now, every afternoon, Belinda does her rounds of her five baby eastern greys, which are all around 16 months old and feed from bottles she gives them one at a time. In the paddock next door are smaller ones that she puts to bed each evening in little sacks that hang from a wooden frame, to resemble as closely as possible their mothers’ pouches. When two scramble to be in the same one, she eases them gently apart and places them into separate beds. The week before, she was also nursing an injured wombat, which she’d had to feed every two or three hours through the night. ‘Then he’d wake us up first thing in the morning demanding to be fed too,’ she laughs.

  Her friend Roz is thri
lled that Belinda has at last found her feet. ‘She should have always been in the bush with all the animals,’ she says. ‘She’s never been happier than she is now. She’s content with her life. It’s just lovely to see.’

  Another important part of her new life is working with Steve on his Desert Duel, the annual car rally that has a different route every year around the Outback. Participants all pay a fee and either bring their own 4WDs or hire them for the journey. In April 2012, the trip was around all the places in Outback New South Wales and Queensland that were affected by devastating floods and Cyclone Yasi, such as Moree, Charleville, Longreach, Windorah, Cunnamulla and Nyngan. In May 2013, it was from Dubbo via Tilpa, White Cliffs, Broken Hill, Mungo and Hay, to Parkes. Every stop, it’s estimated, injects around $16 000 into the local economy through accommodation, food, drinks and sundry spending.

  ‘We raise a lot of money for charity too, from the trip, usually over $50 000 each time,’ says Belinda. ‘It started out for Paralympians, but now we divide it between various deserving causes. It’s all about introducing people in the city to the Outback, showing them what’s there and how accessible it is, while helping out others at the same time. It’s a great, adventurous way to see the bush, and it’s all about giving back. I think everyone gets to a stage in their life when they can . . . and they should!’

  Just sometimes, Belinda tries to give too much, Steve believes. She always puts everyone, and everything else, first – whether that’s an injured kangaroo who needs a warm space in their house, or a person asking for a helping hand. One day, Steve came home to find a young woman with a baby in their cottage next to the house. Belinda had seen her crying in a public phone box and had immediately stopped her car and gone over to ask what was wrong, and found out she’d been kicked out of home by her boyfriend. ‘She knew nothing else about her, but didn’t hesitate to bring her home,’ says Steve. ‘The girl stayed until she’d got herself sorted out. I’m now trying to teach Belinda that she shouldn’t put everyone else first, but it’s a work in progress!’

  In Belinda’s spare time, she still works and sometimes presents fashions in the field for the Cowra Jockey Club, which she’s a committee member of and does public speaking for, helps with the NSW Rural Fire Service and is the patron of Cowra Special Needs Services. She’s also very close to her daughters, Jessie Singleton, 30, who’s set up home in Monaco after completing her Masters in Business there and runs her own website selling bed linen and cashmere goods, and her sister Sally, a 28-year-old singer-songwriter in Sydney who works for an advertising production house.

  ‘I’m very proud of Mum,’ says Sally. ‘She hasn’t had the perfect life and has been through a lot of trials, but she’s always been there for us, and she’s so approachable and affectionate and caring and is a great communicator. She has a genuine empathy for people and she always encouraged us to communicate, too. Every evening around the dinner table, we grew up having to outline the highlights and lowlights of each day, which really helped us talk together as a family. It’s such a great idea that, today, I even continue to do that with my friends.’

  As for Belinda, on her 60th birthday in 2012, she finally married Steve and knows she’s at last happy and content. More official recognition came too, in June 2013, when she was given the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for services to the community. ‘Being brought up the way I was, with those difficult times, maybe gave me the strength and stamina to do Miss World and come back in reasonably good order,’ she says slowly. ‘A lot of those girls started to get screwed up with believing they were the most beautiful person in the world, and then they had huge problems later coming to terms with getting older.

  ‘For me, the experience was great, but my life has never revolved around how I looked, how I was ageing, what I wore, what I weighed. It was all so superficial, being judged and evaluated on how you looked, and I always realised that. Here, I don’t think people even notice if I’ve got make-up on or not, and in the country, people just take you how they find you. They have time for you. I like that. It’s real. When I’m working with the wildlife, that’s very rewarding too. You look at the little joeys and see their perfectly formed paws, and those big eyes looking up at you, and you sometimes hear them calling for their mother. It’s just great to be able to help.’

  3

  NEVER BEGIN TO GIVE UP

  Frauke Bolten-Boshammer, Kununurra, Western Australia

  When Frauke Bolten first flew into Perth from her native Germany, she, her husband and their three small children were clutching onward one-way tickets to one of Australia’s most isolated small towns.

  As they checked in for their next flight, to Kununurra in the remote east Kimberley region of Western Australia, the Ansett stewardess looked at them curiously. ‘You only have one-way tickets!’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you have any idea what Kununurra is like?’

  Frauke smiled bravely but, in truth, she had absolutely no clue. Having lived on farms virtually all her life along a rich agricultural belt of northern Germany, she’d simply assumed that following her adventurous husband to settle the family on land he’d just bought in Australia would be little different.

  But as the plane flew over Kununurra and she had her first glimpse of the rough-and-ready little town crouching in the folds of a vast, unimaginably inhospitable landscape, she felt the knot tighten in her stomach. ‘It was so small and isolated, the most remote area in Australia – and perhaps in the whole world – and I thought there can’t be an intelligent soul living in a place like this!’ she recalls today. ‘It didn’t look possible to live in such a place.’

  When they landed, things went from bad to worse. ‘The dream farm we’d bought was abandoned and primitive and was 90 per cent scrub land with nothing growing. The house on it was very small and so basic and the bathroom was so dark with brown tiles – how could people do that? The heat was terrible; it was 40 degrees every day and the sun was burning.

  ‘In the grocery shop, I couldn’t believe how little variety of food there was. There was powdered milk and even if there was frozen milk, it was off, and the butter was rancid. And the bread! It was all white bread. It was so different to back home. In Germany we had great dairy food and cheese and wonderful bread. But here . . . we didn’t even have toilet paper at one time. Instead, there was just so much cat and dog food on the shelves, I thought, Why don’t they make that section smaller and offer a little more for humans? How come Australians like their animals so much? And the town . . . there were so many dogs everywhere. I cried – I was so unhappy.’

  Her husband Friedrich tried to console her. Things were sure to pick up in time and, anyway, they’d only be staying for two years. It wouldn’t be long before they were back in their beloved Germany, and in their beautiful old home surrounded by lush green farmland. Reassured, she gradually grew calmer. She had no idea that he never really intended to return.

  And, indeed, if Frauke had any inkling then about the tragedies that would befall her in this town, at what felt like the ends of the earth, she may well have turned around and headed straight back to the airport.

  But she’d never been a quitter her whole life, and she wasn’t about to start now.

  Those first years in Kununurra were the hardest Frauke had ever known. It was 1981, and it was still very much a frontier town: small, wild, undeveloped, lonely and with a hugely transient population. The Northern Territory border was just 30 kilometres east, Broome over 1000 kilometres west, Perth was 3200 kilometres south-west and, with Darwin 830 kilometres north-east, its nearest neighbouring town was Wyndham, over 100 kilometres away, and tiny. Used to the comparatively short distances between major German centres, Frauke felt trapped – ironically, in one of the largest wide-open spaces on earth.

  Quite apart from the rugged landscapes, everything else felt so different to life back home for a young woman of 34, with three children, aged 12, 10, and 18 months. At that time, there were only 3000 people in the region, which made
it feel emptier still. And it seemed to Frauke there were only two seasons: it was either stinkingly hot – or stinkingly hot and wet. ‘I’d open the curtains every morning and think, Oh no! Sun again! I’d long for a stormy autumn day. Then when the wet came, it was in one way exciting, with thunderstorms and rain, and it became a bit cooler afterwards, but then it was so humid! It was suffocating. We had one-phase power and air-conditioning in the bedrooms but we had to turn it off by 10 p.m. to save power. So you’d go to bed and just hope you could be asleep by then.

  ‘The rain also brought other problems. The road was closed for up to 10 weeks a year because of flooding. Ten weeks! That could be five weeks maybe from the south, and five from the north. The government had to fly in apples, oranges, tomatoes and lettuce. We’d eat barramundi every day, which we caught from the river, but had to eat it with powdered potatoes from a tin. Even the barra didn’t taste so good any more when you ate it day after day.’

  Gradually, however, Frauke learnt to cope. The two oldest children found school hard, since all the lessons were in English and they spoke only German, but they adapted fast, which was a huge relief for their mum. She also found the locals extremely friendly. Three days after their arrival, neighbours asked them to dinner. Then they received invitations to join others for tennis.